As an expatriate Kenyan, looking back at home over the last few years has shown a huge increase in investment by both MNCs setting up there and investors flocking to back local companies. But it's usually a huge wave of euphoria, helped by a government that wants to appear welcoming, which then peters out as the company projects get bogged down in corruption, resource volatility and inconsistent outflow of human capital. Eventually it becomes a sunk cost but the company continues to operate there low-key while they look for other strategies.
I suspect a very similar situation is happening in many other African states that are pro-investment.
I would say that a key thing to bear in mind is that investments in Africa are first and foremost just that: investments. They could fail. And treating it as a homogeneous body is akin to saying you're investing in North America instead of saying you're investing in a specific company in South Carolina because of xyz economic, social and political factors.
Some of those mistakes really shouldn't have happened, particularly because it was a community of developers and not just some big, old-school corporation.
It's nice to see 95% of people eventually received their items but that could've been achieved with a lot less hassle!
On a side note, I hope the addressing experience was insightful and will be thought of better in future applications. It irks me to see so many web forms with the very American form of "City, State, ZIP" that are not designed to handle any exceptions to that rule, not because the company policy doesn't cater to an international audience, but because the developers didn't realise that addressing is very different across the world - and those people all get their mail just fine.
In a very small way, it always bothers me as a Brit (now living in the US) to see address information ask for (and even require) a ZIP code for int'l customers for two reasons:
1. ZIP is a US-only term. Sure, it's easy to figure out, but it's postal code everywhere else in the world. If an address form has a country field, the form should at least change the label accordingly. If not, even just writing "ZIP/postal code" makes at least some attempt to avoid US-centric terminology.
2. Some countries don't use a postal code system at all. I've seen services make this a required field, regardless of country.
Sorry, this was not aimed at/related to dev.to - just an observation of address fields in general. Glad you were displaying geographically appropriate address info :)
True. Although parts of the Canadian Atlantic region have had tough economic times over the last couple of decades with collapse of fishing and light manufacturing, it's nice to see cultural resurgence and pride. They are definitely trying to woo tourists now so now is the perfect time to visit before all the crowds come!
True. Solutions can't simply be copied and pasted across countries with very different population sizes, political systems, cultures etc. But I think the author takes this into account and isn't advocating for outright "do what they do", but is instead saying that the focus could go on things like restructuring insurance itself.
Naturally, with this issue now tangling with race, poverty and individual state laws it's an uphill battle.
Hardly surprising given that international travel, especially for leisure is exceedingly sensitive to perception of the news. It takes a long time to build up tourist numbers, but a small incident can cause the sharpest falls immediately.
But I'd argue that even before the Trump administration, the USA was immensely difficult to travel to for anyone in a country that's not part of their visa waiver program. USA is one of the few places to require a transit visa even if you only connect at one of their airports and visa arrangements have exorbitant fees attached to them. They have a perception abroad of having stressful border control - even so for Canadians who arguably enjoy the easiest access to the US compared to any other country.
It certainly doesn't help to have higher minimum salaries for work visas and a possibility of being kicked out after completing a degree on study permits, which affect business and student visitors respectively. And finally, dealing with American companies from abroad can be a huge resource commitment as you often have to adopt American standards and clearances in parallel to other internationally adopted schemes or your own local one. But for a long time, the costs justified the prospects of visiting, simply because of the access you get to American markets. With Trump adopting "America first", a lot of people will just not bother deal with travelling to the USA anymore.
Right you are! I've put a footnote in the article to reflect the change in status. After all those years outside, the AU probably strategically wanted a sizeable regional power like Morocco back in. Unfortunately for the Sahrawis, apart from an EU ruling every now and then, their cause is all but forgotten.
In the larger context of the article though, it probably doesn't change much of the political reality.
Nicely written post! I've had this issue when trying to focus on just the content of the page.
It would be interesting to see if you can find any deeper filtering ideas from other browsers - like Firefox has a "reader view" that strips away cruft from pages. Or even looking at the source code of some open-source feed reader apps like Flym - they do a great job of scraping off content and caching it online in a searchable format.
That's a fair point when dealing with such a large number of countries (and a widely varying stage of development between them). But the passport would have to be designed to adhere to ICAO standards in any case. That would make countries legally obliged to accept it as a valid travel document.
But that, in addition to all the other factors mentioned in the article, requires a lot of formalisation or written AU mandate - none of which has happened.
> designed to adhere to ICAO standards in any case. That would make countries legally obliged to accept it as a valid travel document
That can't be true. It is possible for private individuals to create documents that adhere to those specifications. In fact, some do but of course the documents are not accepted.
I stand corrected! So from what I read up, ICAO adherence only facililitates quicker processing at the entry point[0]. But member nations are not bound to anything.
So I previously thought that a country can obviously choose who it will accept with its own laws, but that it has to still recognise a valid travel document. That's obviously not true because there are many countries that refuse to recognise documents like the Israeli or Republic of China passports, despite them being perfectly standardised. Or the case of individually declared documents like the world passport or Liberland [1].
So in this case, the AU would have to formalise the status of the document in law, then member nations have to ratify it, before anyone should feel comfortable trying to travel on it. But of course, this isn't EU law that is generally well enforced; there's hardly anything stopping many African nations from flouting international, regional or even their very own set of laws! Hardly looking promising... It's just a shame there's so much wasted effort going in to this.
I guess they would only have to accept it if it was issued by a country that they recognize? And if the AU is not recognized as a country by other countries, they shouldn't have any obligation to accept the passport as a travel document?
I suspect a very similar situation is happening in many other African states that are pro-investment.
I would say that a key thing to bear in mind is that investments in Africa are first and foremost just that: investments. They could fail. And treating it as a homogeneous body is akin to saying you're investing in North America instead of saying you're investing in a specific company in South Carolina because of xyz economic, social and political factors.